Divorce literature

Professor Angela Abela writes: 'This chapter provides us with an overview of post-divorce outcomes for children and their parents. Outcomes related to the family breakup are not any different from those experienced by members of the family who go through marital separation. An extensive section identifies the conditions that influence risk and resilience for children. The authors then move on to review the effects of life in a single parent household, parental dating, re-partnering, cohabitation and remarriage on the parents and on the children. Relationships with the non-resident parent, between siblings and with grandparents are also discussed.'

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Dr Ruth Farrugia writes: 'Eekelaar and Maclean, both from the University of Oxford, discuss the correlation between marriage as an institution and notions of responsibility within personal relationships. They examine the decline in the sense of obligation hitherto salient in personal relationships and observe that this is also the case in marriage. The paper reviews the results of an empirical research study carried out by the Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy which questioned participants’ reasons for marrying or not marrying, delving into the complex nature of responsibilities between partners. The evidence shows shared values for persons living together, independently of married or unmarried status.'

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Dr Ruth Farrugia writes: 'Margaret Brinig, who holds the chair in Family Law at Notre Dame Law School which is the oldest Roman Catholic law school in the USA, writes about the way statistics and majority rights are frequently cited in order to promote major policy initiatives. Together with Steven Nock she examines the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) which is a nationally representative longitudinal study incorporating a Child Development Supplement (CDS) shedding valuable light on outcome analysis for children and their families. Results show that happiness for children is not determined by the family income although children are always better off if their parents marry. She reviews the impact of remarriage after divorce and divorce itself on children, questioning the rise of behavioural problems in children of mothers who do not remarry subsequent to divorce. Brinig concludes that there is a need for greater attention to empirical studies carried out by impartial researchers.'

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Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Abstract
Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilise a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

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The Legacy of Parental Divorce: Social, economic and demographic experiences in adulthood

Abstract
This study addresses three questions. Firstly, to what extent does divorce during childhood have long-term consequences for the educational attainment, economic situation, partnership formation and dissolution, and parenthood behaviour in adulthood? We show that in most of these domains children who experience parental divorce in childhood have more negative experiences than children reared by both their parents. However, in answering our second question, as to whether child and family characteristics preceding divorce attenuates the relationship between the divorce itself and adult outcomes, we show that for the non-demographic ones there is evidence of powerful selection effects operating, particularly to do with financial hardship. In other words, children who grow up with both biological parents may end up better off educationally and economically largely because they were advantaged to begin with, not necessarily because their parents stayed together. The third question was - if parents remain together until their children are grown up before separating does this lessen the legacy of divorce on their adult children’s lives? The answer is in the affirmative for most of the adult outcomes, but the instability of partnerships and marriages was as high amongst those whose parents separated after they had grown up as those who experienced parental divorce during childhood.

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